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Journalism of Courage
NASA announced on Monday that its Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft is fully operational after the mission team successfully reset it on March 2. Last month, the IBEX spacecraft went into contingency mode after experiencing a flight computer reset during a planned contact.
IBEX is a small NASA spacecraft designed to map the boundary where winds from the Sun interact with winds from other stars. The spacecraft is about the size of a bus tire and its instruments look towards the interstellar boundary while it is on its nine-day orbit around our planet. It was launched in 2008 and has spent nearly 15 years in space already.
While the kind of flight computer reset that happened on February 18 has happened before, last month’s event was different because the team lost the ability to command the spacecraft when it happened, according to NASA. They tried regaining command capability by resetting ground systems hardware and software, but they were unsuccessful until March 2.
To take IBEX out of contingency more, the mission team performed a firecode reset instead of waiting for it to perform an autonomous reset and power cycle on March 4. A firecode reset is an external reset of a spacecraft. They were able to do this because of the favourable communications environment around the point where the spacecraft’s orbit was closest to Earth, or its “perigee.”
